SEO Tycoon

**Bookworm-SEO** · 12-24-2006, 02:50 AM

Ok, so the classic example of dupe content hurting yourself is having www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.php and domain.com/index.php. EF's got all four running. Wouldn't it make more sense to 301 the others to wherever Lee wants the canonical url to be?

**Brandon** · 12-24-2006, 02:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bookworm-SEO

Ok, so the classic example of dupe content hurting yourself is having www.domain.com, domain.com, www.domain.com/index.php and domain.com/index.php. EF's got all four running. Wouldn't it make more sense to 301 the others to wherever Lee wants the canonical url to be?

the real question for me is this..

isn't this

http://www.earnersforum.com/archive/...hp/t-6955.html

and this

http://www.earnersforum.com/showthread.php?t=6955

the same content ? :detective:

**BamaStangGuy** · 12-24-2006, 03:04 AM

I believe so: http://www.vbulletinzone.com/t9/

That is my whole opinion on the matter. I think vBulletin out of the box leaves much room for improvement in SEO.

**Bookworm-SEO** · 12-25-2006, 02:05 PM

Wow, impressive find there Brandon. Lee? Do you care?

**NBF** · 12-25-2006, 08:07 PM

I just wrote about this at Forum Trends the other day:

http://www.forumtrends.com/forum-seo...for-forums.htm

Basically, Google acknowledges that forum software creates duplicate content and they don't intend to penalize for it, but they encourage webmasters to point their bots to the correct format of the content so they know where to send people.

I agree that vB could use some help with SEO, but knowing that Google understands this and doesn't intend to change rankings because of it means that this particular issue probably isn't a big deal.

My 2 cents.

(Make sure to read what Google had to say.)

**imported_illusion** · 12-25-2006, 11:59 PM

Well personally I don't create a forum for search engine traffic. I want to create a forum for people to enjoy, so than overtime the search engines give me love and slowly rank me. I just don't like doing all that unnecessary **** when in essence age will help it rank in itself

**jakerz** · 12-26-2006, 12:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by illusion

Well personally I don't create a forum for search engine traffic. I want to create a forum for people to enjoy, so than overtime the search engines give me love and slowly rank me. I just don't like doing all that unnecessary **** when in essence age will help it rank in itself

I think that's where Lee is headed.

**imported_illusion** · 12-26-2006, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jakerz

I think that's where Lee is headed.

You mean he is going to sell it or take it offline, because I said you create it for the users and not the engines and let it age.

**jakerz** · 12-26-2006, 12:45 AM

No, I think his priorities are users first. He already has a huge user base and he didn't need the search engines. I think he'll change it all up in the future, but first hes building the community, not the amount of results in google.

**Bookworm-SEO** · 12-26-2006, 12:46 AM

I don't think age will get it to rank itself. There are [shameless plug #1] huge problems with Google's rankings based on age (which I think has a lot to do with its [shameless self-promo:] TrustRank algorithm that allows spammers to exploit .EDUs). Sooner or later Cutts et co. will have to address this problem, and when it does, age's weighting in its algorithms will be far lessened.

Thanks for the answer though Laura. I guess it makes sense, though arguably it doesn't take much effort to redirect the dupes.

**BamaStangGuy** · 12-26-2006, 12:50 AM

Some people you just won't convince other wise. Obviously no one bothered to look at what I wrote nor comment on my views on why vBulletin is crap out of the box for SEO. They can continue to run their forums like they are and fall behind.

Just because Google *can* handle it and sort through it doesn't mean that you get the same rankings as if Google doesn't have to weed through the crap duplicate urls, duplicate content, to get to the actual page you want to get ranked well. Having more than one url (vBulletin has many more than one url) linking to the same thread is very bad. If 1 person uses x url to link to your thread and another person uses y version to link to the thread then you have two links that are getting pagerank instead of one and google will not count one of those links as they will pick x or y and use it. Therefore you are reducing your link weight to that thread and losing valuable link weight that others, whom correctly seo their urls, are gaining.

**Mike** · 12-26-2006, 01:36 AM

Duplicate content is not good, no matter how you look at it. Just because the forum software you use creates it automatically out of the box doesn't mean you are safe from having your links devalued.

The big argument against this is that "my pages are being indexed without any SEO". Well, how about having your number of pages indexed being cut down about 400% and having the remaining pages indexed higher after allowing google a year to fully index you and re-evaluate your page value. I think you will be much happier.

vBulletin creates many pages for each URL, and naturally, those links share the value that they could be combining for one strong URL. I have an ATV community that is one of the newest ATV communities on the web. Just started it this year, and started it with vbulletin and vbseo at the same time. For 90% of the typical ATV related searches (manufacturer name, manufacturer forums, model specific forums, etc..) I am ranking higher than forums that have been around for 6-7 years.

I am not saying you need to use vbseo to do this, but i am saying that using something, either bought, or you own, to condense these URL's is going to benefit you.

As far as the benefit of vbseo, it does it with ease, and the company is constantly updating the software to make it currenty with vbulletin. In addition, there are many "on page SEO" modifications added to the vbulletin pages automatically including cleaning up html, optimizing html, and if you use adsense, it automatically adds google's section targeting for more relevant ads on your site.

As for dynamic vs. Static, google can index both. This goes back to an above comment though. Many people have complained about a link ot their site on google that is invalid. It is a dynamic link that got picked up by google that was only valid for that visit when google was indexing. Sure, it picked up the exact URL, but it also indexed the string of numbers/letters for an additional URL going to the same content (duplicate). Static URL's eliminate this, and they are much cleaner to look at.

**Bookworm-SEO** · 12-28-2006, 03:52 AM

good contributions there bama and mike. i guess what it comes down to is this:
1) does google's technology combine the links you're getting into one score?
2) is there a penalty for giving spiders extra work?

in my personal experience, the answer to #1 is no, or at least not yet. it could be in their plans. But as of just recently, my montrealseo.ca did a frame/masking redirect so that visitors wouldn't see my blogspot URL (less just cuz it looks less professional, no blackhat stuff going on). And it got rankings for it's own name, but nothing for the same search with keywords reordered. I dropped the masking and got the ranking on the other order for the keywords. (Montreal SEO and SEO Montreal). IMHO, this is because forwarding without a mask allowed the big G to understand that montrealseo.ca=cityseo.blogspot.com and therefore they should be equal. But the mask made it look like there was no forwarding, and therefore two separate URLs. in other words, the redirect mask made for dupe content.